Succession — the patriarch and the weight of a blessing

What the work does

Jesse Armstrong’s Succession ran for four seasons on HBO from June 2018 to May 2023. The series follows the Roy family, controlling shareholders of Waystar Royco, a global media conglomerate. Logan Roy is the founder and the patriarch; his four children — Connor (from his first marriage), Kendall, Siobhan (“Shiv”), and Roman (from his second marriage) — compete across the run for his approval and for the position of succession to the company.

The show’s structural question is which child the father will choose. Across forty episodes, the answer changes; Logan tells different children at different times that they are the chosen successor; the show stages, in detail, what being chosen and being passed over do to each of the four children. The fourth and final season’s central plot turn — Logan’s death in the third episode — does not resolve the question; the question becomes whether the company will be sold (removing the succession question) or whether one of the children will assume the role.

The dialogue is under copyright. This entry describes the series’ structure without reproducing more than identifying phrases.

The biblical patriarchal blessing

The biblical patriarchal blessing — the berakhah (בְּרָכָה) — is one of the structurally weight-bearing institutions of the Genesis narratives. The principal sequences:

Genesis 25:29-34 — the birthright sale. Esau, returning from hunting, exhausted, sells his birthright (Hebrew bekorah, the rights of the firstborn) to Jacob for a bowl of lentil stew. The narrative voice does not condemn Jacob; it notes that Esau despised his birthright (25:34). The birthright is presented as something that can be sold, but the act of selling registers as a moral category.

Genesis 27 — the stolen blessing. Isaac, old and blind, prepares to give the patriarchal blessing to Esau, his elder son. Rebekah, Isaac’s wife, arranges for Jacob to deceive his father by impersonating Esau (covering his hands with goatskins to mimic Esau’s hairiness). Jacob receives the blessing. When Esau arrives, the deception is discovered:

“Then Esau exclaimed, ‘Wasn’t he rightly named Jacob? For he has supplanted me these two times. He took my birthright, and now he has taken my blessing.’ Then he asked, ‘Haven’t you reserved a blessing for me?’” (Genesis 27:36, BSB)

The narrative pauses on Esau’s question. He is asking: is there more than one blessing? Have you held one back for me?

Isaac’s answer registers the situation as catastrophic:

“Indeed, I have made him your master, and I have given him all his brothers as servants. I have sustained him with grain and new wine. So what can I do for you, my son?” (Genesis 27:37, BSB)

“Esau said to his father, ‘Do you have only one blessing, my father? Bless me too, O my father!’ And Esau wept aloud.” (Genesis 27:38, BSB)

The narrative voice records Esau’s weeping. The blessing, in the Genesis universe, is not transferable except by another act of the same patriarch. Isaac eventually does pronounce a secondary blessing on Esau (27:39-40), but it is materially smaller and structurally subordinate. Jacob holds the primary blessing.

The Hebrew berakhah: HALOT renders it “blessing.” But what the text shows is that the berakhah is the substance of patriarchal succession. It is the transfer of inheritance, of identity-in-the-line, of relation to the covenantal promise. The blessing is not an expression of affection; it is a thing that, once given, cannot be retracted.

Genesis 48-49 — Jacob’s deathbed blessings. At the end of his life, Jacob (now Israel) summons his sons and blesses them. The blessings differ child by child. To Joseph he gives the double portion (through Ephraim and Manasseh in Genesis 48). To Judah he gives the kingly promise — the scepter shall not depart from Judah (49:10), the text Christian tradition reads as a messianic promise. To Reuben he gives a censure that reduces his standing as firstborn (49:3-4). Each son receives what he receives; the sons cannot trade with each other.

These three sequences establish the pattern the rest of the Hebrew Bible operates with: the patriarchal blessing is a substantive transfer, weighty enough that fraud over it (Jacob’s) and recipient grief over it (Esau’s) become canonical narrative moments.

The parallel in the show

Several features of Succession run alongside the Genesis pattern:

• The father chooses unequally. Logan’s relationships to his four children are not equal. Particular favour and particular censure attach to different children at different times. The show stages this not as Logan’s failing but as the situation the children grow up inside.
• The blessing as substance. Logan’s expressed preference is read by every other character — including the children themselves — as a substantive transfer, not an opinion. When Logan tells Kendall, in season 1, that he will not be the successor, the line cuts. When Logan in season 4 tells Roman certain things, the lines cut. The children orient to the father’s words as decisive.
• The blessing as zero-sum. When one child receives the favour, the others register it as having lost something. The show stages this directly in repeated scenes of the siblings as antagonists where the structural antagonism is over which of them is currently in the father’s favour.
• The grief of the passed-over. Esau’s cry — do you have only one blessing? — is a structurally available register for the show’s children. The show does not require the audience to know Esau; the cry is the cry the show repeatedly stages.

The show’s setting is contemporary corporate America, not patriarchal Israel. The substance being transferred is a media empire and the social capital of being its inheritor. But the form of the question — who will the father bless? what does the blessing do? what does it do to the others? — is the form Genesis works with.

What the parallel does not commit to

This entry does not argue that Succession is a biblical work or that Armstrong drew on Genesis. The patriarchal-blessing structure is a wide one in narrative — King Lear works with it, Western inheritance literature works with it, twentieth-century family epics (Mann’s Buddenbrooks, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude) work with it. The parallel to Genesis is documentable; the source claim would be over-reading.

For the related figure of Joseph, son of Jacob — who in the Genesis narrative is given the double portion and becomes the structurally weighty inheritor — see Joseph — son of Jacob.

To read the Genesis patriarchal narratives in other translations:

• Genesis 25 — NIV →
• Genesis 27 — NIV →
• Genesis 48-49 — NIV →